Why Open Source YOUR Knowledge

Your repo becomes a second brain#

Open-sourcing knowledge is not an act of pure altruism. Even if not a single soul sees it, the act of organizing your knowledge and writing it down solidifies it in your head. However, you needn’t remember everything because your repo becomes a second brain that can store and search infinitely more information than you can.

In this limited sense, it doesn’t matter whether this knowledge is private or public, except that it’s nice to be able to punch in a few terms to Google and find your own notes!

A short step to help beginners#

Of course, it is a short step to helping beginners, too. Because you were recently a beginner, you can explain things at an accessible level and arrange topics in logical introductory order (whereas, an expert might be too far away from the basics to relate).

Experts help you#

The unexpected benefit comes when your open-source knowledge starts being useful to people who know more than you. Experts are always busy with a million things and get more opportunities and requests for help than they can handle. You’re effectively building a resource they can point people to.

Now, the experts are incentivized to help you be the best resource, for example, by fixing mistakes and holes in your open-source knowledge. In this way, I’ve been taught TypeScript by experts from Airbnb, Artsy, PayPal, and the TypeScript core team for free.

Friendcatcher#

It is a Friendcatcher, a great starter form of leveraging your time.

Grows your network#

It slowly grows your network, expertise, and association with the domain. The expectations are low, and your work is open for all to see. Therefore, you never feel like you have to be an overnight expert. It grows with you, so once you do know a lot, you will have built up a wealth of credibility and the resources to back it up.

It is living#

It is never “done” and has the advantage of always being up to date compared to more highly produced pieces of work.

Big L#

It has a Big L of L(PN), and possibly more if you spark a self-sustaining community.

Easy and permission-less#

It is easy and permission-less. Anyone can live stream, tweet, or write markdown in a repo. Unlike speaking at a conference or publishing an O’Reilly book, you don’t need anyone’s permission to get started.

Repurposed for anything#

It can be repurposed for anything. Because you’ve laid down all your sources mise en place style, you can adapt that to creating a talk, a workshop, a blog post, a library, or anything else based on your needs. You will find that open-source knowledge has a longer useful life than any open-source code you write.